Human utility embodies a number of seemingly irrational aspects. The leading example in this paper is that utilities often depend on the presence of salient unchosen alternatives. Our focus is to understand <i>why</i> an evolutionary process might optimally lead to such seemingly dysfunctional features...

Human utility embodies a number of seemingly irrational aspects. The leading example in this paper is that utilities often depend on the presence of salient unchosen alternatives. Our focus is to understand <i>why</i> an evolutionary process might optimally lead to such seemingly dysfunctional features...

Different markets are cleared by different types of prices—seller-specific prices that are uniform across buyers in some markets, and personalized prices tailored to the buyer in others. We examine a setting in which buyers and sellers make investments before matching in a competitive market....

Different markets are cleared by different types of prices—seller-specific prices that are uniform across buyers in some markets, and personalized prices tailored to the buyer in others. We examine a setting in which buyers and sellers make investments before matching in a competitive market....

We define and explore no‐upward‐crossing (NUC), a condition satisfied by every parameterized family of distributions commonly used in economic applications. Under smoothness assumptions, NUC is equivalent to log‐supermodularity of the negative of the derivative of the distribution with...

Consider an agent who can costlessly add mean‐preserving noise to his output. To deter such risk‐taking, the principal optimally offers a contract that makes the agent's utility concave in output. If the agent is risk‐neutral and protected by limited liability, this concavity constraint...

We define and explore the No-Upward-Crossing NUC, a condition satisfied by every parameterized family of distributions commonly used in economic applications. Under smoothness assumptions, NUC is equivalent to log-supermodularity of the negative of the derivative of the distribution with respect...

Consider an agent who can costlessly add mean-preserving noise to his output. To deter such risk-taking, the principal optimally offers a contract that makes the agent's utility concave in output. If the agent is risk-neutral and protected by limited liability, this concavity constraint binds...

Some private-monitoring games, that is, games with no public histories, can have histories that are almost public. These games are the natural result of perturbing public monitoring games towards private monitoring. We explore the extent to which it is possible to coordinate continuation play in...